Katsu Sushi

Katsu Sushi
572 Danforth Avenue East
416-466-3388
All you can eat buffet for two with all taxes, tip and beer: $45 (Mon-Thur: lunch $8.99, dinner $14.99; Fri - Sun: lunch $9.99, dinner $16.99)

Years ago my favourite Japanese restaurant closed without notice. It was a great spot for lunch, had a Japanese grocery attached, and was run by a Scotsman. Still, it served some of the best Japanese food around.

Since then there have been other sushi/Japanese restaurants but none as good. However, Katsu Sushi on the Danforth is pretty damn close.

The room is long and looks like it may have at one point been victim to a television makeover. But the back is beautiful, with a skylight and a tree growing in the middle of the space, touching the ceiling, and making the winter gloom seem not so, well, gloomy.

But they have a buffet. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Sushi buffet? Gah!” But what’s important here is that this buffet is made-to-order and everything on it is simply a slightly smaller version of their full-sized cousins on the regular menu. And every bit as tasty and well made.

To order my companion and I are given a card with a hot menu and cold menu. Customers simply tick off what they want. The buffet cards are replaced as we get the plates for the previous order. The plates come out with enough for our table to share.

The temptation is to get one of everything right away, but watch out because anything left on the plate results in an extra charge over-and-above the set price.

So where to start? A good rule of thumb for judging the quality of cheap and cheerful Japanese restaurants is how well they do tempura. Has it sat on the pass under heat lamps waiting for pickup, losing whatever crispness it may have had in the process? Or even worse has it sat in not-hot-enough oil for too long coming out like wet-paper-towel-wrapped leftovers?

Katsu seems to have avoided these deep-fried fates by presenting lightly battered, quickly cooked vegetable tempura that doesn’t make the bloodstream feel clogged. The vegetables actually still have some bite left in them without being underdone.

Another stand out from the hot menu is the teriyaki beef. This was a surprise. After years of overcooked, grisly cuts drowning in cornstarched teriyaki glue, this beef was sirloin, cooked medium rare in a light sweet soy, that required four servings just to make sure it was real.

The best of the cold menu was the salmon and red snapper sashimi and the spicy barbeque salmon-skin rolls. The fish was clean, sweet and generous. The rolls were textbook, not over-riced, the nori still had snap and the salmon skin - although on the cold menu - was crispy and still hot from the grill.

Other standouts were the deep-fried gyoza pork dumplings and the almost-candied teppanyaki chicken nuggets, and well-constructed maki-sushi California rolls, with the correct balance of avocado to mock crab.

But it can’t all be flawless can it? No, it can’t. We had two servers. The first was a very abrupt Final Fantasy character that liked to bark. Maybe it was the end of his shift, but he was soon replaced by an efficient if not entirely accurate waitron.

The place filled up quickly - appealing for the most part to a younger crowd - causing the wait staff to lose the plot.

My companion and I decided to just go with the flow and even though we didn’t order more teppanyaki we ate it any way. Good thing too as our second order of calamari never was able to make it out of the kitchen.

The only other problem was the lack of dessert. But maybe we were supposed to order that separately and as most places rely on a couple of scoops of ice cream, maybe we were better off.

Despite that the visit was still worth it. Katsu Sushi isn’t a bad spot, even without a Scotsman on staff.